Head down. Low profile. Hope they hate the other guy more. Do Kamala Harris’s tactics sound familiar?

Kamala Harris’ strategy for winning the White House could be best summed up as: tread as carefully as possible.

The US vice president has shunned the traditional stable of national media interviews, frequently ducked grillings by journalists, and only recently added a policy platform to her campaign website.

It is perhaps the most restrained approach to a presidential election in recent years, a highly disciplined effort to build the broad voter coalition she will need if she is to beat Donald Trump.

The 59-year-old Ms Harris has reason to believe this tactic could work - and it comes from across the Atlantic: Sir Keir Starmer’s Ming vase strategy.

Cautious and calculated, Sir Keir and the Labour Party eschewed bold policy announcements for a safety-first, data-driven approach to winning back disenfranchised working class voters while retaining its more urban, liberal base.

Insiders say the Harris campaign has taken note of Labour’s route to victory this summer.

It is understood there have been numerous exchanges between Democratic figures and Labour MPs, including at the Democratic National Convention last month.

Top Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s general secretary David Evans, Jon Ashworth, head of the think tank Labour Together, and several Labour MPs were among those to attend the four-day gala in Chicago.

This month, two of Sir Keir’s former top advisers - Deborah Mattinson, Sir Keir’s former head of strategy, and Claire Ainsley, his former director of policy - also travelled to Washington to brief Democratic strategists and Harris campaign figures on their insights.

‘Strategic dilemma for the centre Left’

“That strategic dilemma for the centre Left of, how do you win over what you might call the squeezed middle, that is a really central dilemma for both parties,” said Ms Ainsley. “And so therefore there was interest in, how did Starmer start to turn this around?”

In polling and focus groups conducted in key swing states for the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute, Ms Mattinson and Ms Ainsley found “real parallels” to the preoccupations of their target demographic - what they termed “hero voters”.

Here’s the overall picture as is stands.

For Labour, these were disaffected working class voters struggling to make ends meet, who perhaps voted for Brexit and backed Boris Johnson in 2019.

Ms Harris’ campaign has also launched a calculated effort to win back a similar demographic - undecided voters, many of whom are parents, without a college degree and living pay cheque to pay cheque - who abandoned the Democratic Party for Trump in 2016.

“Politically, there are some major differences [between Britain and America], not least our voting system,” said Ms Ainsley.

“But there are some similarities, and what we wanted to do was see if we could apply some of the approach that Deborah and the Labour team took to understanding the voters that we needed to reach.”

Who Labour targeted, and why

What they discovered, she said, was that these target groups “are certainly open to voting for Harris in the way that they were open to voting Labour, but they really wanted to hear what the economic offer was”.

Labour’s response was to release a pledge card that outlined its proposed first steps in government: stabilising the economy, reducing NHS waiting lists and controlling migration better.

Ms Ainsley said the Harris campaign had done well to acknowledge the cost of living crisis, but suggested the vice president could do more to “crystallise” her economic message.

She cited the Harris campaign’s proposed policies on price gouging, affordable housing and tax cuts for small business owners. “Those are the sorts of things that those voters are wanting to hear more about,” she said.

The similarities between Ms Harris and Sir Keir go beyond their political style. Both are former prosecutors from modest backgrounds, something they have both drawn on in their campaign pitches.

Both Ms Harris and Sir Keir also lack the personal, charismatic appeal of Bill Clinton and Sir Tony Blair - the most recent Democratic and Labour leaders to have an intensive trans-Atlantic dialogue around political strategy.

A counterbalance to Right-wing populism?

But Ms Harris’ allies, like Sir Keir’s, have argued this may in fact be a strength: an appealing counterbalance to prevailing Right-wing populism.

However, critics have suggested that the so-called Ming vase strategy could have downsides for the Harris campaign.

With many of its economic policies untested during the election campaign, Labour has faced questions by independent analysts over its proposals and polls suggest the Government has struggled to find popular support for some.

Karen Finney, a veteran Democratic strategist and close Harris ally, said there were clear differences given Ms Harris was a sitting vice president.

“To some degree, she has a record that she’s running on,” she said, but as the presidential candidate Harris has also “talked about what she wants to do around housing, small businesses that are slightly different priorities in some ways, than where the the Biden Harris administration has been.”

Harris’s late entry a factor

Ms Finney said while there were some parallels to be drawn with Labour’s approach, Ms Harris’ strategy was partly borne out of her late entry into the presidential race.

“We’re in a very unique situation in that she became the nominee in July, and so there isn’t as much time for a big, [vastly different] policy rollout,” she noted.

“Given the accelerated time frame that this election is happening on, message discipline is all the more important, because every communication with voters is critically important,” she said. “If you make a mistake, there isn’t as much time to try to recover from it.”

Ms Finney also defended the Harris campaign’s decision to shun traditional media in favour of online streaming, such as Thursday night’s event with Oprah Winfrey.

“They clearly decided that they want to use the majority of the candidate’s time directly communicating with voters… So the events that they do, all the digital communication, the other platforms that they’re using,” she said. “It remains to be seen if that will work”.

Garry South, a Democratic strategist in Ms Harris’ home state of California, said there was some truth to the criticism that the vice president has not discussed policy enough.

But he said his years of experience running campaigns, polling and focus groups had reinforced to him that “voters, for the most part, are not policy-heavy when they vote for president.”

He argued that veteran party operatives such as himself “have no problem with Kamala Harris not giving hour-and-a-half interviews with every news outlet - because I just don’t think that voters are into that”.

“I would rather have my nominee being careful and being cautious than shooting their mouth off every three minutes, like Donald Trump,” he added.